eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

11/23/2014

"A sin which is attended with great conveniences."

The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders REVIEW

James Oakes sets out to understand one single subgroup of antebellum America, slaveholders. He aims to explain where they came from, the process by which they came to possess slaves, the logic they used to justify slavery, how they structured their plantations and farms to exploit slaves, and what they were willing to do to protect them as property.

From his study of slaveholder journals, diaries, letters, and speeches, Oaks has attempted to draw a more accurate picture of just what middle class slave economies looked like on the ground. He draws a few interesting conclusions.

First, he dispels the notion that the standard Southern slave-owner was running a plantation. Most slaves were owned by a farm family with five slaves or fewer (small businesses, not Microsoft operations). “The only surprise in all of this,” Oakes writes,

“is that the middle-aged white farmer with perhaps a handful of slaves quickly disappeared from the history books, replaced by a plantation legend that bears little resemblance to historical reality. . . . To own 20 slaves in 1860 was to be among the wealthiest men in America, easily within the top 5% of southern white families.”

Secondly, he notes that slavery was just one part of a hierarchical system where everyone found themselves pigeonholed into a certain “caste” in the wider society. Slaves were simply at the bottom of that pyramid. “The principle of social equality was not only alien;” he says of Southern society at large, “it was the equivalent of disruption, chaos, and anarchy.” Many maintained the slave system who did not have slaves themselves because they feared the social disorder that would result from any breakdown of the system.

The third reality of the Southern slave system that Oakes outlines has to do with the connection between slaves and commerce. “The distinguishing function of slaves in the South’s market economy,” he writes,

“was to serve not only as a labor supply but also as capital asset. Consequently, the most distinctive feature of black slavery was the systematic effort to dehumanize the slaves by treating them as property.”

Slaves were a “liquid asset” for many slave holders. They were an “investment” that slaveholders hoped would increase in value and that would return profit when sold in time. They looked at slaves much like we might look at stocks and bonds today. They were a mechanism for wealth acquisition. Most slaveholders in the South were involved in land speculation and hoped to buy a piece of property, improve it with slave labor, and then sell at profit and move on. The majority of slave family disruptions took place, says Oakes, when these farmers would sell land for speculative land investments further West and dispose of their slaves in the process. “The most common venture of the large slaveholders was land speculation,” he writes,

“They bought vast tracts in the west and waited for it to be settled – even encouraged settlement – in an unblushing effort to beat the new immigrants out of the cheapest lands. . . . Land and slaves became the two great vehicles through which slaveholders realized their ambitions of fortune. After ‘Jackson and the banks,’ an Alabama master wrote 1834 what most concerned his neighbors was the distribution of public lands. ‘The people cannot be satisfied till they get them for nothing, he complained, or next to nothing.’

“For young men just commencing in life,” James Steer from Louisiana in 1818 wrote, “the best stock, in which you can invest capital, is, I think, Negro stock; Negroes will yield a much larger income than any bank dividend.”

The author notes that many slaveholders were intent on buying and selling for profit margins and rarely settled down. Indeed, one of the reasons why they often lived in such poor conditions had everything to do with the fact that they were not intending to stay where they were. They always had their eyes on some further horizon.

Alexis DeToqueville makes this observation in his classic, Democracy in America.

“In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it, and he sells it before the roof is on: he plants a garden, and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing: he brings a field into tillage, and leaves other men to gather the crops: he embraces a profession, and gives it up: he settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves, to carry his changeable longings elsewhere.”

A fourth aspect of slaveholder life that might surprise a reader has to do with just how psychologically troubled (consciously or unconsciously) slaveholders were about the morality of what they saw as a “necessary” system.

In 1807, John Mills, a Louisiana master, explained his nuanced moral position to a northern cousin;

“I am a slaveholder myself, and have increased the number within two months past, to twenty-five in the field, besides house and body servants. You must not think that I approve of that inhumane commerce, of tearing them from their native country and friends by force of arms, or by treachery or finesse. No I assure you that there is no man on earth, that can see it anymore horrid light than myself.”

In other words, he assuaged his guilt about using slaves by condemning those who originally kidnapped them from Africa. In many of the sources that Oakes uncovered, there was a deep ambivalence about this institution that only seemed to work when masters had to use violence to get profitable labor from their slaves. “The Important place of religion in the proslavery defense is an indication of how deeply slaveholders felt the need to bring their ethical convictions into line with their daily practices,” Oakes says,

“The only philosophical justification of slavery that ever gained any real popularity amongst slaveholders was the religious one, and the high percentage of proslavery tracks were in fact written by clergyman. Theirs was not an easy task.”

“The contradiction between the implications of evangelical Protestantism and the religious proslavery argument tortured the souls of more than a few masters.”

“A South Carolina slaveholder complained that his father had too much religion to keep his negroes straight. Deeply religious slaveholders frequently complained about the cruelty that was built into slavery. A pious Alabama master found punishment an unpleasant duty, but one nevertheless which in the present state of things, must be attended to. A North Carolina slaveholding minister believed ‘it was a pity that slavery and tyranny must go together – and that there is no such thing as having an obedient and useful slave, without the painful exercise of undue into tyrannical authority.’”

Over and over again, the sources seem to concur on this point. Slavery, slaveholders were told, was supposed to work for slaves and masters. It was supposed to be a win-win arrangement when managed correctly, but almost nowhere did it actually work. And if it did not work, it was always the slaveholder who must not be managing his slaves correctly. Slaveholders were thus inclined to find fault in themselves and in their style of management, not in the system itself. And they worried about the future of a system that they did not know how to escape. The following excerpts may serve to illustrate.

“More specifically, masters feared for their children in a slave society. ‘You know, my dear son, I abhor slavery,’ Henry Laurens protested. ‘I am not the man who enslaved them, nevertheless I am devising means for manumitting many of them and for cutting off the entail of slavery but what will my children say if I deprive them of so much estate?’”

“In the state of slavery, I almost feel that every apparent blessing is attended with a curse,” another slaveholder reports. A South Carolina a slaveholder wrote that “although their wives have no dread of the future – there are but few husbands and fathers of daughters who do not feel at times dreadful apprehensions."

Many of them found themselves slaveholders in spite of their concerns.

“Born and raised in the midst of slavery, Jeremiah Jeter never considered the question of whether human bondage was right or wrong. Nevertheless he was always moved by the great severity of slavery, and so grew up with a determination never to own a slave. But when Jeter married a woman who owned bondsmen, he found himself in a dilemma. The laws of Virginia prohibited manumission unless the slaves were shipped out of the state, and the slaves made it clear they did not want that.”

“The slaveholder confirmed the central tragedy of their lives by declaring their inability and unwillingness to change. ‘We were born under the institution and cannot now change or abolish it,’ a Mississippi slaveholder declared. He would rather be ‘exterminated’ then be forced to live in the same society with the slaves, if freed.”

“If different masters manifested varying degrees of guilt,” Oakes argues, “few escaped it entirely, for the elements of psychological conflict were intrinsic to slaveholding culture.”

Oakes suggests that the Southern economy provided few avenues to prosperity that did not require slave labor and that the temptation was far too ubiquitous for aspiring farmers to resist indefinitely.

“’I abominate slavery,’ Henry Watson Junior of Alabama had written in 1835, shortly after moving to the south. But within fifteen years, Watson had repudiated his youthful ideas. ‘If we do commit a sin owning slaves,’ he wrote his wife, ‘it is certainly one which is attended with great conveniences.’”

“What's slaveholding did to the economic pyramid of white society was to expand its highest stratum,” the author writes. “In 1860, the twelve wealthiest counties in United States were below the Mason-Dixon line. Adams County, Mississippi, had the highest per capita wealth of any county in the nation.” Just as the only road out of poverty in some inner cities today involves drugs or basketball, ambitious starters in the South were eventually forced to consider careers that involved land speculation or slavery (usually both).

This “reality” led to the need for multiple psychological defenses. To profit from slaves, slaves had to work. Making slaves work generally required the master to inflict some kind of abuse (or threaten to inflict it). “Few slaveholders ever bothered to offer a coherent racial defense of bondage in their letters or diaries,” Oakes writes,

“So ingrained were their racist assumptions that slaveholders were most likely to reveal themselves by recoiling in shock from the mere hint of racial egalitarianism or anti-slavery sentiment. Black equality was simply inconceivable, a subject not even open to discussion.”

“Alexander Stephens came as close as any slaveholding politician to articulating a racial defense of slavery. ‘As a race, the African is inferior to the white man,’ he told the Virginia secession convention in 1861. ‘Subordination to the white man, is his normal condition. Our system, therefore, so far as regards this inferior race, rests upon this great immutable law of nature.’ If few slaveholders publicly carried the logic of racism as far as Stephens, still fewer publicly disagreed with his conclusions.”

“For his argument to hold, his assumptions had to be racist, but his defense of slavery was primarily one of economics and property rights: he had bought his slaves and paid for them. A South Carolina master agreed. ‘The slaves’ earnings belong to me, because I bought him; and in return for this, I give him maintenance, and make a handsome profit besides.’ That was the way most slaveholders preferred to look at it.”

“Many slaveholders apparently believed that if it could be shown that British workers were oppressed and somehow southern slavery was justified.”

Slaveholders, when they were not repressing the question entirely, relied on excuses that only worked because everyone used them. Slaves were better off in slavery. Other systems of exploitation were just as bad. It would be risking the lives of our women folk to let the slaves go free. Etc. For many of them, the clinching argument had to do with freedom itself. Slavery is what allowed freedom. And because freedom was a good end, slavery had to be indirectly good.

“In this country alone does perfect equality of civil and social privilege exist among the white population, and it exists only because we have black slaves,” the Richmond inquirer declared. “Freedom is not possible without slavery.”

“In Jackson's wake, southern politicians quickly learned to connect their devotion to freedom to the defense of slavery.”

The last thing that I learned about the slaveholders of the American South from this book is something that I sometimes think about education. Teaching in a public high school, I am, not unlike the slaveholders of Antebellum America, in the business of getting people to work without pay. We educators are constantly going to workshops to learn how to do this better. But I sometimes wonder if maybe it is the system itself that keeps it from working.

“The almost religious zeal with which the advocates of managerial expertise advertise their systems exposed their conception of themselves as reformers. Although most of the authors were slaveholders writing from experience and observation, they wrote also out of frustration with prevailing practices.”

“The reformers were similarly frustrated in their efforts to promote a system of management so perfectly rationalized that the physical punishment of slaves was all but eliminated. In theory, whipping was the last resort; in practice, it was the disciplinary centerpiece of plantation slavery. ‘If the law was to forbid whipping altogether,’ a Louisiana slaveholder said, ‘the authority of the master would be at an end.’”

“Frederick Olmstead correctly perceived that the most productive plantations throughout the seaboard slave states were those where the slaves had the most autonomy.”

In other words, the best way to make slavery work was to get rid of it. It is a shame that it took a devastating war to do something that made such common sense.

Question for Comment: Have you ever tried to make a system work that no amount of tinkering with could make work?

Comments

In my high school English class, I have been reading OLD MAN and the SEA by Earnest Hemingway.

I have been focusing on all the internal obstacles that Santiago the fisherman has to overcome to catch his big fish. The first one is the fact that the people in the village have essentially let him know that they will take care of him. He hasn't caught anything for 84 days and people have started to give him free food and beer.

He declines to accept "retirement" and goes out "deeper than he has ever been.

I suspect that anyone who is offered a free ride will have difficulty declining it. we are wired for efficiency I guess.

So there are conflicting messages to deal with. You are inferior and will need help. Here is help. Don't take the help.

I guess I will only say what I have always said. People do not make decisions as groups. They make them as individuals. And people act in ways that make sense to them.

I have received three weeks of unemployment benefits in my life ... But I could easily find myself not hired back at my present job next year.

It is hard work and I can feel myself almost starting to want to sabatoge myself.

Doing it right now actually.

I need to get some homework done. Grin. Sorry about the game today. Sure you don't want to move to New England? Anyway, we will try to down those Packers for you next week.